The 4 Dimensions of Recovery

Recovery isn’t something that occurs in isolation from the rest
of your life – to sustain the hard fought gains of recovery you must make progress
and achieve some success in 4 key areas of life:

Health – You must work to overcome your disease
and you must strive to live today and in the future in ways that support
emotional and physical health.

Home – You must have a safe, sober and stable
place to live.

Purpose – You must have some purpose to your
daily life. Purpose may come from career, volunteering, family caretaking,
creative pursuits or from many other things. You must also have the income and
ability to participate in a normal way in the activities of your community.

Community – You must develop or nurture a social
network of friends or family around you

The 10 Ideals of Successful Recovery

Recovery begins from within but it’s also strongly
influenced by the people around you and the environment you live in. In an
ideal world, your recovery is based on the following 10 principles of success.

1. You Believe That Recovery Is Possible

Unless you believe in the possibility of recovery and can
generate some hope for a better future you’ll have a difficult time overcoming the
bumps in the road intrinsic to any recovery journey.

2. You Define Your Own Goals and Choose Your Own Recovery
Process

Ideally, you decide for yourself where you want to be and
how you’ll get there. There are a lot of paths to success and many different ways
to achieve recovery - but you’ll never get there unless you’re striving towards
what you really want.

3. You Understand That There Is No One Right Way

Just as no two people are alike no two recovery journeys
will follow the same path.

Your history, your cultural background, your health, your
motivation and desires and a thousand other things influence your unique needs.
What worked for someone else might not work for you. Follow your heart and find
something that feels right – but remember, for people with substance abuse
disorders, abstinence is usually the best course of action, no matter how you
decide to get there.

4. You Integrate Your Recovery into Everything in Your Life

You know that your recovery is not something you separate from
the rest of your life. You integrate your recovery into the way you take care
of your mind, body and soul and it factors into every important decision you
make, from where you live, to what you do for a living to who you spend your
time with.

5. You Make Use of the Strength, Support and Expertise of
Others Also in Recovery

By involving yourself with support or self help groups with
others also in recovery you take advantage of shared knowledge and experience about
what works and what doesn’t from a group of people facing very similar trials
and challenges.

6. You Make an Effort to Surround Yourself with People Who
Support Your Recovery

One of the toughest parts of many people’s recovery journey
is making sure to only surround yourself with people who believe in your
recovery and act in ways that support it. These people will encourage your
efforts and help you stay motivated when times get rough. People like this will
try hard not to act in ways that jeopardize your recovery.

7. You Choose a Recovery Path That Fits With Your Culture
and Values

Your actions need to make sense within your cultural
environment and nothing in your recovery journey should contradict your deeply held
values or beliefs. A recovery path which is not culturally appropriate is
unlikely to yield long term success.

8. As a Part of Your Recovery – You Deal with Past Traumas

Leaving past emotional, sexual or physical trauma unexamined
endangers your long term recovery. As a part of your recovery process you need
to make sure that you work at achieving some closure over past traumas so that
you can shed the anchors of the past as you move forward to the future.

9. You Make Full Use of Resources within Yourself, Your
Family and Your Community

To sustain recovery you need to make full use of all
resources and support, be they at the individual, family or community level.

Examples could include taking a sabbatical at work to focus
on recovery, making use of child care assistance offered by a sibling or
enrolling in low cost community skills or interest courses arranged by your
municipal government. What you have and what you need will vary greatly, but
what’s important is that you put your recovery first and do everything you can
to get all the support you can.

10. You Find the Respect You Deserve

A lack of respect imperils the recovery process. You deserve
respect so make sure you surround yourself with treatment professionals,
friends and family that grant you what you deserve. Though you have a disease
you do not deserve discrimination or stigma. Strive to protect your equal
rights to respect and fairness and if you cannot prevail against those that
discriminate extract yourself from these unhealthy environments.1

Helpful Reading:

One of the finest compliments I receive from recovering alcoholics is that despite the fact that I am not an alcoholic, I understand how their minds work. I have profound respect for all the old sayings in AA. Some are open to interpretation - the "insanity of our disease" is a literal statement.

For the next 10 seconds, try not to think of a pink elephant…Impossible, right?! The fact is, the more you try to suppress an impulse to use drugs or alcohol the more fixated your mind becomes on that very impulse, and this is bad news for anyone serious about maintaining their sobriety. Fortunately, you don’t have to drink or use and you don’t have to fight or suppress your cravings, all you have to do is surf over them and they’ll disappear – using a proven mindfulness technique known as urge surfing.